Dowel Biswas

When cultural institutions crumble, archives burn, and instruments shatter, it is not merely walls that vanish—it is memory, identity, and moral courage. Culture cannot be revised; it is what history has written. Every assault upon it shakes the quiet foundations of a nation’s conscience.

For Sunny, the film is not “urgent” — a word he resists — but it offers a revision of political history told through lived experience rather than rhetoric. “We’ve been mistreated by the British, by India, by Pakistan, by our own governments. These layers flow through the film. If it does anything, it helps us see where we stand politically, socially, and economically. And honestly, no one needs to watch a film. Sometimes not watching is the best choice.”

Last evening, that engagement unfolded with both reverence and vitality at “Aloker Ei Jhorna-Dharay” (The Eternal Illumination), a collaborative tribute by the Embassy of Sweden in Dhaka and HSBC Bangladesh.

At Chhayanaut’s Ramesh Chandra Dutta Memorial Hall on Sunday, nostalgia met reverence as artists, activists, and admirers gathered to celebrate the birth centenary of filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak and his twin sister, singer Protiti Devi.

The Ministry of Cultural Affairs has turned this remembrance into a national homage — a three-day festival from October 17 to 19 at Lalon’s resting ground in Cheuriya. There will be music, discourse, and a fair that carries the rhythm of his spirit.

The awards’ focus on technical categories is an act of cultural intervention, asking audiences and peers alike to reconsider who counts in the making of art.

The exhibition presents a rare visual chronicle of one of Bangladesh’s greatest treasures, Sultan, spanning from his reclusive days in his village home in Machimdia, Narail, to his later years. Photographs, letters—many never previously seen—allow viewers to step quietly into the private world of a man who preferred to live through his paintings, labour, imagination, and solitude.

That night in December 1921, while his comrade Muzaffar Ahmed slept, Nazrul scribbled furiously. By the morning, the air was charged with something new. “Bolo Bir, Chiro Unnoto Momo Sheer…” (“I am the Rebel Eternal, / I raise my head beyond this world, / High, ever erect and alone!”) he declared. It was not merely the birth of a poem but of a cultural rupture. Critics would later see in “Bidrohi” a break from the ‘Rabindric’ serenity that had long defined Bengal’s literary landscape—a new current of words forged in fire, laced with the clang of rebellion.